Watcher Release Notes (Pre-5.0)

Bug Fixes

• Deleting a watch now is independent from its current execution state in order to prevent failed deletions with watches having small intervals
• Chain input: Parsing now throws an exception if a data structure is added, that cannot keep its order

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a serialization error that resulted in the watch history not being written when a proxy is specified in a watch.
• Triggered watches are now correctly deleted from the .triggered-watches index if they are rejected due to a full thread pool.
• Deleting or closing the .watches index now correctly cleans up the in-memory watch store so the watches are no longer executed.
• If the HTTP request for an attachment fails, the error message is included in the watch history.
• Fixed a possible exception when chained inputs don’t execute successfully.

Enhancements

• Hostname verification can be disabled for Watcher HTTP actions.
• Running watches can be updated and deleted.

Enhancements

• The HTTP headers of a response are now part of the payload and can be accessed via ctx.payload._headers

Bug Fixes

• The watch history was not written, if one of the chained inputs resulted in a failure as well as an input containing a field name with dots
• Status of an acked watch, whose condition evaluates to false again is now properly persisted and not lost in case of a master node switch
• Fixed the watch history template so payloads and request bodies are handled correctly. To update an existing installation, delete the existing watch history template by running DELETE /_template/watch_history and the correct template will be autocreated. To verify the template is recreated, call GET /_template/watch_history. Note that this just updates the template, so you need to wait one day for this update to take effect when a new history index is created.
• The watcher.http.proxy.port setting for global proxy configuration was not applied correctly.

Bug Fixes

• Putting a new watch with state active=false now stores that state correctly on a multi node cluster.
• Fixed the watch history template so nested request bodies are handled correctly. To update an existing installation, delete the existing watch history template by running DELETE /_template/watch_history and the correct template will be autocreated. To verify the template is recreated, call GET /_template/watch_history. Note that this just updates the template, so you need to wait one day for this update to take effect when a new history index is created.
• The HTML sanitizer now supports border and cellpadding attributes on table elements and the colspan and rowspan attributes on <td> and <tr> elements.
• Fixed the Watcher/Marvel examples in the documentation.

Enhancements

• Adds support for Elasticsearch 2.3.3

Bug Fixes

• All SMTP connection timeouts are now set to two minutes by default to prevent a watch from getting stuck.
• HTTP headers from responses that contained dots led to exceptions when the HTTP response was stored in the watch history. All dots in any header names are now replaced with underscores. For example, a header called foo.bar becomes foo_bar
• Hipchat action: Fall back to the default Hipchat color and format if they are not specified at the account level or within the action itself, instead of failing.

Enhancements

• Adds support for Elasticsearch 2.3.1

Bug fixes

• The http client does not do any URL escaping by itself anymore, preventing potential wrong double escapes.

Enhancement

• Support url in http requests as a shortcut for path, scheme, port, params
• Support ignore_condition and record_execution as parameters in the Execute Watch API

New Features

• Added PagerDuty action
• Added support for adding attachments to emails via HTTP requests and superceding and deprecating the usage of attach_data in order to use this feature

Bug Fixes

• The croneval CLI tool sets the correct environment to run

Enhancements

• Adds support for Elasticsearch 2.2.0.

Enhancements

• Adds support for Elasticssearch 2.1.2

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue that prevented sending of emails

New Features

• Adds support for chaining several inputs

Enhancements

• Adds support for Elasticsearch 2.1.0.
• Adds support for configuring a proxy in the webhook action, http input and configuring a default proxy (which is also used by the slack action), using the watcher.http.proxy.host and watcher.http.proxy.port settings.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where the scheduler may get stuck during Watcher startup. This caused no watches to ever fire.
• Fixed an issue where under specific conditions Watcher would not start if there are not finished watch executions from the previous time that watcher was running and those watch execution are unable the execute during the current start process.

Enhancement

• Adds support for Elasticsearch 2.0.1.

Bug fixes

• Fixed an issue where under specific conditions Watcher would not start if there are not finished watch executions from the previous time that watcher was running and those watch execution are unable the execute during the current start process.

Breaking Changes

• The dynamic index names support has been removed and Elasticsearch’s date math index names support should be used instead. The only difference between Watcher’s dynamic index names support and Elasticsearch’s date math index names support is how timezones are expressed. In Watcher this is done via node settings, in Elasticsearch the timezone is part of the date math index names support. Only if you’re using dynamic index names with timezones in Watcher then you need to upgrade your watches after the upgrade, otherwise your watches will work as they did before the upgrade. For example if watcher.dynamic_indices.time_zone setting was set to +01:00 and a watch has the following index name <logstash-{now/d}> then after the upgrade you need to update this watch to use the following index name <logstash-{now/d{YYYY.MM.dd|+01:00}}>.

New Features

• Added new HipChat Action
• Added new Slack Action
• Watches now have an active state. In addition, a new API was added to activate/deactivate registered watches.
• Added new array_compare, that can compare an array of values in the Watch Execution Context Model to a given value.

Enhancements

• Watcher continuously checks if the index templates for .watches, .triggered_watches and .watch_history-* exist. Whereas before the existence of these index templates was only checked at Watcher startup time. The absence of these index templates leads to watcher data being indexed incorrectly, which then can cause Watcher to behave incorrectly.
• If Watcher was stopped via the stop Watcher api and after that a master election took place then Watcher would then unexpectedly start.
• During Watcher start up only wait for the shards of the .watches and .triggered_watches indices to be available. Before Watcher also waited for the shards of the .watch_history-* indices, which wasn’t needed. This improved time it takes for Watcher to startup.
• If action.auto_create_index setting has been configured then Watcher will check if the setting is too restrictive. If the action.auto_create_index is too restrictive then Watcher will fail during startup with a descriptive error message.

Bug Fixes

• If Watcher was installed with Security then the Watcher index templates couldn’t be stored and could lead to Watcher behaving incorrectly. This was caused by Watcher not detecting correctly if Security was installed.
• Update croneval command line utility to properly handle whitespaces in the elasticsearch home path.
• Fixed an issue where the scheduler may get stuck during Watcher startup. This caused no watches to ever fire.
• Fixed url encoding issue in http input and webhook output. The url params were url encoded twice.

Enhancements

• Dynamic index names now support specifying a time zone to be used when computing the names of the indices. The default is UTC. Previously, the computation was fixed to always use UTC when computing the names of the indices.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a compatibility issue with Elasticsearch 1.6.1 and 1.7.2, which were released earlier today.

Enhancements

• Added execution time aware dynamic index names support to index action, search input, and search transform.
• You must now explicitly specify the unit when configuring any time value. (Numeric-only values are no longer supported.)
• Cleaned up the Get Watch API response.
• Cleaned up the Stats API response.

New Features

• Added inline watch support to the Execute API

Enhancements

• Added execution context variables support.
• Email html body sanitization is now configurable.
• It is now possible to configure timeouts for http requests in HTTP input and webhook actions.

New Features

• Acking and Throttling are now applied at the action level rather than the watch level.
• Added support for multi-doc indexing to the index action.
• Added a queued watches metric that’s accessible via the Stats API.
• Added a currently-executing watches metric that’s accessible via the Stats API.

Enhancements

• The compare condition result now includes the value of each field that was referenced in the comparison.
• The Execute API now supports a default trigger event (breaking change).
• The watch_record document structure in the .watch_history-* indices has changed significantly (breaking change).
• A new internal index was introduced - .triggered_watches
• Added support for headers in the Webhook Action result and the HTTP Input result.
• Add plain text response body support for the HTTP Input.

Bug Fixes

• Disallow negative time value settings for throttle_period
• Added support for separate keystore and truststore in Webhook Action and HTTP Input.